Blair: Brexit won’t be reversed any time soon
Ex-PM chides Remoaners at ‘ideas factory’ that promotes voting reforms
SIR Tony Blair said yesterday that Brexit would not be reversed as he hosted a conference on centrist politics inspired by French president Emmanuel Macron.
The former Labour prime minister called the ‘Future of Britain’ conference an ‘ideas factory for what a modern Britain should look like’.
He said his foundation – the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change – would put forward a range of policies, but stressed it was not a manifesto or a prelude to setting up his own centrist party.
Speaking at the conference, former Tory Cabinet minister Rory Stewart suggested Britain would be better off with a proportional representation voting system because it would help centrists. He said he did not like the current first-past-the-post arrangement because it was ‘adversarial’ and ‘encourages people towards the extremes’.
Sir Tony hoped Labour would take his ideas on board – and warned leader Sir Keir Starmer against turning off the type of people who voted the Liberal Democrats in at last week’s Tiverton and Honiton by-election.
He claimed that without them, Labour
‘Encourages people towards the extremes’
would never win an election nationally, adding: ‘To put it in a very blunt, crude way – you were previously voting Tory, and now vote Lib Dem in a by-election.
‘[Labour] want them to stick with the Lib Dems at the next election. Those people have got to be comfortable with the prospect of a Labour government.’
The event’s organisers were said to have been ‘desperate’ to get Mr Macron to discuss his La Republique En Marche party, which has been renamed Renaissance, but he was unavailable because he was at the Nato summit in Madrid.
Yesterday’s event in central London was attended by centrist figures including former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and money saving expert Martin Lewis. Remainers such as ex-Tory MP David Gauke, former Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson and Labour frontbencher Peter Kyle were also there.
Sir Tony said: ‘However passionately I opposed Brexit, I understand – we’ve done it. We’ve done it legally, we’ve done it politically, and it’s not going to be reversed any time soon – let’s say any time in this generation.’
He urged Labour to ‘seal the deal’ to ensure it can win the next general election, and joked about how hard it must have been for Sir Keir to take over from predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, saying: ‘Keir Starmer has done an amazing job pulling the Labour Party back from where it was. But to win the next election, it’s got to have a policy agenda – [be] prepared to reach out beyond its traditional base and pull people who voted Liberal Democrats, maybe soft Tories.’
Last night, he told BBC2’s Newsnight that Labour would not want an electoral pact with the Lib Dems – and that Sir Keir must be clear that a Labour government cannot afford a wave of strikes.
÷ The Lib Dems would demand electoral reform without a referendum as the price for propping up a Labour government with a socalled ‘confidence and supply agreement’, the New Statesman magazine reported yesterday.